Text From Museum Wall Labels Altered to Describe My First New York Apartment
Kitchendent
This work is one part large-scale kinetic sculpture and one part site-specific
installation. Replacing conventional artists' tools (pencil and paper,
paint and canvas) with the weight of a refrigerator and the rotting
floor of his kitchen, Hart mechanizes the practices of shape-making
and pressure. At a slow rate, the sculpture's hypnotic and continual
grooving into the floorboards and collapsing of the rest of the room
evokes polarities of building and destroying, existence and disappearance,
displacement and migration. The tension builds as the audience is
left to contemplate when the application will plunge through to the
apartment below, and in the meantime we see Hart engaging with the
space by working on his skills for putting on an incline.
L'Oven
The content of this work is almost nothing: a converted closet with
a kitchen wall unit and no light. This piece is based on a cycle of
repetitive contradictions: an oven that can't open completely because
the door is denied by the wall, a stove with two broken burners and
no ventilation. Hart controls the fundamental conditions of movement
within the space by constricting our walking to only a side-shuffle.
He treats the walls with flinged grease and spaghetti splatters, the
blood-like color underscoring the draining repetition of bachelorhood.
Akin to John Cage's influential 1952 sound piece 4'33"—a
four-minute, thirty-three-second composition of silence-this witty,
sensorial work subverts the normal spatial and temporal parameters
of the cooking experience.
The Hunt
This four-channel video installation was shot inside the railroad apartment above a Chinese restaurant (sometimes referred to as "Chinese Fingertrap") where Hart and his roommate lived illegally with a man on parole who only pretended to live there to evade the law. Images of the vermin-infested shithole are accompanied by a soundtrack
of Hart cursing to himself about ways to kill the mice chewing away the walls next to his bed. In night-vision cameras we see him constructing a new bed three feet off the ground out of chairs and pillows, and watch him slowly loss grip with reality as he tries new methods of rodent murder including dusting bleu cheese with Comet and stuffing these balls into the walls. The Hunt is an imprint of the haunting memories embedded in architecture.
Bachelor Nest
Hart uses found objects in such a way that each retains its distinct identity and space. A mattress on the floor, a black and white television with oversized antennae, random bits of wood, wire shelves cluttered with books, a pirate flag juxtaposed with an American flag, and a 5-iron are assembled in The Bachelor Nest. These items are taken from life, specifically in Hart's all-purpose 10 x 10 room (which also serves as a hallway) and point to the underbelly of the American bachelor psyche by creating counterpoint and tension through their juxtaposition. "I came from Los Angeles, a city of facade," Hart says. "What's behind it? We're two-faced! I'm trying to break the facade-mix things up. Also, I have no money or closets. All my shit is on the floor, yo."
Valva! Valva! Recycling!
Hart first photographed his illiterate, shifty, screaming Italian landlord as part of a project documenting freaks. He continued photographing him and made multiple photographs over the length of his living in the poorly heated, over-priced, pay in cash crapshack. The images maintain a consistent tone, showing a balding and sweaty figure yelling in Italian about the recycling and his heart condition, looking incrementally more crazed as time passes. The pictures not only document the clothed ape that was always sulking in the hallways, but also record Hart's progression through cultural and geographic displacement.
David Hart works in a museum and lives in Brooklyn with his girlfriend and a freakish cat. His writing is routinely rejected (and occasionally published) in McSweeney's Internet Tendency.